October
18, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- With signs of a global economic downturn mounting, US
aggression across the Middle East and North Africa ratchets up.
Once again, US imperialism stands poised to open the gates of
Hell.

According
to the IMF's
World Economic Outlook report released last week, the "risks
for a serious global slowdown are alarmingly high." The report
projects the world economy to expand just 3.3 percent this year
and 3.6 percent in 2013 -- both projections down from the IMF's
July forecast. As Joseph Davis, chief economist at the Vanguard
Group, cautioned to the
Wall Street Journal, "The odds of a global
recession are not fully appreciated."

Indeed, as
the
Financial Times reports, the Tracking Indices for
the Global Economic Recovery, the Brookings Institution-Financial
Times index of the world economy, finds severe problems "in
both advanced and emerging markets."

And,
though the IMF continued to peddle the harsh elixir of austerity
for the depressed economies of the euro zone periphery, in its
latest report the Fund also came to tacitly acknowledge the
limits of austerity.

"The IMF
now says global efforts to slash deficits and debt may have hurt
growth because they occurred too quickly and too widely," the
Wall Street Journal reported.

But, with
the limits of austerity as a means of resolving the present
crisis apparent, the last remaining card for the capitalist
elite to play in their attempt to regenerate global capitalism
appears to lie in unleashing the forces of "creative
destruction" wrought by military aggression. As Henryk Grossman
warned in his
Law of Accumulation, "The destructions and devaluations
of war are a means of warding off the immanent collapse [of
capitalism], of creating a breathing space for the accumulation
of capital."

And it is
thus out of the need to renew the impetus for global capital
accumulation that the iron fist of US imperialism slips its
velvet glove and gains free rein once more across the full
spectrum of what American neo-conservatives deem the "arc of
instability."

US
Imperialism on the March

According
to the
New York Times, the Pentagon is readying military
strikes in Libya in retaliation for the September attack on the
US compound in Benghazi. As the paper reports, "The top-secret
Joint Special Operations Command is compiling so-called target
packages of detailed information about the suspects."

"Potential
military options could include drone strikes, Special Operations
raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden and joint
missions with Libyan authorities."

At the
same time, the Pentagon has dispatched a task force of 150
military "planners" and "specialists" (i.e., special operations
troops) to a Jordanian military base along the Jordan-Syria
border. Speaking at a NATO conference in Brussels last week, US
Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta claimed that the task force was sent to help
Jordan "monitor chemical and biological weapons sites in Syria."

The
specter of chemical weapons has been increasingly used as a
pretext by the Atlantic powers to threaten military intervention
into Syria. As President Obama declared in August, the use of
chemical weapons by Syrian forces would be a "red line," which
would force him to change his "calculus" on intervention.

"Once
again," an editorial in the state-run
Xinhua news agency of China said in response,
"Western powers are digging deep for excuses to intervene
militarily in another conflict-torn Middle East country."

Sure
enough, as the
New York Times reported, discussions have already
taken place about using the Jordanian-stationed US task force to
help establish a buffer zone within Syria.

Of course,
the stepped-up targeting of Syria cannot be decoupled from the
joint Israel-US campaign against Iran. After all, as hawks
Michael Doran and Max Boot argue in a
New York Timesop-ed, the first reason American
intervention in Syria is now merited is because it "would
diminish Iran's influence in the Arab world."

The road
to Tehran, we see, may very well lead through Damascus; however,
the urge to fly non-stop to Tehran may just prove too strong to
resist.

Marching Toward Tehran

According
to a report in
Foreign Policy by David Rothkopf, the US and Israel
are actively planning a joint "surgical strike targeting Iranian
enrichment facilities." Rothkopf, a former Clinton
administration official and Editor-at-Large of Foreign
Policy, cites his source as stating that "the strike might
take only 'a couple of hours' in the best case and only would
involve a 'day or two' overall."

Rothkopf
goes on to trumpet the idea of a "surgical strike" as a
potential October Surprise Obama could use to silence the
Republican critique of his Iran policy in the remaining weeks of
the closely contested presidential election.

Of course,
peddling the notion of a so-called "surgical strike" on Iran is
nothing particularly new. In March, Jeffrey Goldberg reported
for
Bloomberg that Israeli talk of striking Iran had
assumed a rather optimistic bent.

"One
conclusion key [Israeli] officials have reached," Goldberg wrote
after a trip to Israel, "is that a strike on six or eight
Iranian facilities will not lead, as is generally assumed, to
all-out war."

Such
assessments, though, are rather dubious, given that they
directly contradict war game simulations determining that any
strike against Iran would quickly spiral into a greater regional
conflict. As the
New York Times reported earlier this year, a war
game simulation run by the Pentagon forecast that an Israeli
strike "would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in
the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead."

Likewise,
a September war game organized by Kenneth Pollack, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle
East Policy, resulted in a dangerous escalation from both sides.
As the
Washington Post's David Ignatius reported, "The
game showed how easy it was for each side to misread the other's
signals."

"Misjudgment was the essence of this game," Ignatius continued.
"Each side thought it was choosing limited options, but their
moves were interpreted as crossing red lines. Attacks proved
more deadly than expected; signals were not understood; attempts
to open channels of communication were ignored; the desire to
look tough compelled actions that produced results neither side
wanted."

"War," as
Clausewitz wrote, "is the province of danger."

Toward Barbarism

US
imperial dreams, however, are not confined to the Middle East.
Imperial ambitions -- rooted in the capitalist logic of endless
expansion -- are inherently limitless. Thus, we see the US
today readying to light a powder keg under the greater Middle
East, while simultaneously "pivoting"
to the Asia-Pacific region in order to "contain" a rising China.

US
imperialism, though, is destined for defeat (and sooner rather
than later). The US, after all, can only use its immense
military power to keep potential competitors in check for so
long. Change cannot be held back by the barrel of a gun in
perpetuity. As Lenin asked and answered in his pamphlet
Imperialism: "Is it 'conceivable' that in ten or twenty
years' time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will
have remained unchanged? Absolutely inconceivable."

But
imperial powers are always deluded by their power -- impervious
to its ultimate limits. As a George W. Bush administration
official once remarked to the journalist
Ron Suskind: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality
-- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things
will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of
you, will be left to just study what we do."

(We would
be mistaken to believe that such hubris is not as present in the
Obama White House as it was in the Bush administration.)

Such
pretensions of the power elite, though, are but a byproduct of
the imperialist imperative of endless expansion and conquest.
And it is this very imperative that today compels US
imperialism ever closer towards igniting a global military
conflagration sure to unleash unimaginable human misery and
suffering.

Nothing
less than barbarism thus threatens. The only hope for humanity,
then, lies in the struggle for a socialist alternative. Our
choice is truly one of socialism or barbarism.

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